


network effects (the tragedies after duscur)

by mareza



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Blue Lions backstory spoilers, Gen, Like, Pre-Canon, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, briefly pre-timeskip and post-timeskip, it's abstraction time baby, that's what the whole thing is about
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-11
Updated: 2019-09-11
Packaged: 2020-10-14 18:40:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20605472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mareza/pseuds/mareza
Summary: Tragedy never strikes once. There was the Tragedy of Duscur: the royal family, their knights and retainers, the firstborn sons of noble houses beloved to the crown. Then there was the Tragedy enacted on Duscur: men, women, children, old and young, armed and helpless.And then there were the tragedies that came next.





	network effects (the tragedies after duscur)

**Author's Note:**

> warnings for references to or descriptions of genocide/mass slaughter, ptsd, violence, dehumanization, racial prejudice, codependency, child abuse. you know. JustBlueLionsThings™.
> 
> there WAS a relatively cute snippet in here but i had to remove it for pacing so now everything is miserable the whole way through. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

**i.**

Tragedy never strikes once. 

A king is murdered; a prince collects the corpses of courtiers and comrades in the delaying of his revenge. Tragedy comes for a hero, yes, will chase him to the final act, but first it gathers up collateral damage. An old king’s daughters fall to each other's malice; a ruling couple throws their countries into a war. When an ambitious lord races towards his fall, his wife and half the court precede him off the stage. It’s hungry, this thing called tragedy. It bloodies the room on the ricochet. 

There was the Tragedy of Duscur: the royal family, their knights and retainers, the firstborn sons of noble houses beloved to the crown, all gone in the time it takes the sun to cross from zenith to horizon. The country grieved, and chaos reigned. 

There was the Tragedy enacted on Duscur: men, women, children, the young and old, the armed and the helpless. The country did its best not to leave alive anyone who might grieve that.

And then there were the tragedies that came next.

  
**ii.**

“I don’t know about this, Rodrigue,” says the regent to his audience of two. “The boy is from Duscur.”

In the years to come, Dedue will learn that such conversations as these, conducted quietly in private studies and parlors between men whose blood entitles them to ownership of lives, are the underpinning of all of Faerghus’s affairs of states. He will learn that the audience chambers and balconies are for show—“The theatre of royalty,” Dimitri will sigh—but not for making decisions, not unless a ruler has been very careless and found themselves cornered into a public choice. He will learn, also, that Grand Duke Rufus of Itha is a careless man, and that it is Duke Fraldarius who has in this moment saved his life by asking for the discretion of a private talk.

“He is,” Rodrigue answers, and Dedue does not know why he talks so carefully, but he does know that Rodrigue has not let anyone divide him from Dimitri yet. “But Prince Dimitri has become quite fond of him. I fear that separating them now would lengthen the prince's recovery time.”

“These people killed Dimitri’s father,” Rufus says, choking on his grief, as if his orders did not kill Dedue's entire family in their beds. “My brother. They slaughtered all our companions, our oldest friends and allies.”

“Be that as it may,” Rodrigue answers, still calm and careful, “this boy has been the prince’s only companion since the Tragedy struck. Gustave said they could not separate them for anything. He said that the prince would not sleep without the boy at his side. Please, Your Highness. Allow Prince Dimitri this comfort at least until he can walk again.” 

In this moment, Dedue understands two things: first, that for the rest of his time in the capital, people will either speak of him as if he isn’t there or as if he isn’t human. At times, it will be both. He must learn to endure such violence, or he will not survive.

The second is that for as long as he is here, he will have to rely on the protection of others, and that protection will be conditional in all cases but one. He is an orphan of hatred, with no kin or country, and he must never raise his voice or hands in his own defence.

  
  
**iii.**

Rufus permits Dedue his life and his presence, because Rufus is a terrible man and a terrible ruler, but Dimitri is all the family he has left. But there is a condition for this: a child of Duscur cannot be permitted to wander the palace as guest. So begins another parlor room debate. Should the boy be made a cook, a cleaner? Should he be server, cupbearer, stablehand? There is no question that it must be a role of service, a role that Duscur's people should be grateful to have, but which is best? 

Dedue is not asked his opinion, of course. He has learned quickly that only Dimitri asks for that. But at last, Rufus concedes that if Dimitri wishes for Dedue as a companion, he must be kept close at hand, and though a prince’s personal retainer is a prestigious role, it at least is one where it is clear who rules and who obeys.

It falls to Rodrigue to explain the meaning of this role in this foreign house. Rodrigue has been called back to Fraldarius to bring order to the region, but he has insisted on staying long enough to see the prince settled. Dedue, for what he has become, is part of that.

“A vassal gives his life to his lord,” Rodrigue tells him. “He always obeys him and defends him from all harm. His devotion is absolute and unflinching, and should his lord command it, his life is his lord’s to spend as he sees fit.” Something of this brings pause to Rodrigue, and he stops in his explanation. But Dedue knows nothing of this man, save that his devotion to Dimitri is unquestionable, and cannot guess what part of such a simple oath might trouble so loyal a man.

What he understands is the smile Rodrigue puts on next, for it is not unlike the one he often puts on to try to ease Dimitri’s fears. Dedue takes some comfort in it: this man to whom he owes some form of debt for protection at least sees him as worth a lie like that. “Regardless, Prince Dimitri has asked for you as a friend, and I imagine his commands will mostly be for your companionship. A vow of fealty is answered by a lord with a vow of protection, after all. You offer him your service, and he in return grants you home and rank.”

This, Dedue understands, is Rodrigue’s own way of protecting them. It is also the truth: his life belongs to Dimitri, and there is no need for a Faerghan ritual to make it so. Dedue has no other loyalties left

Dismissed, with Dimitri in a room with blue walls and blue curtains and blue carpet so starkly unlike the woven patterns that decorated his home that he cannot stomach them any longer, Dedue seeks out the ramparts to look down at the town below. Even from here, he can see a bright fire, belching smoke and flame into the evening air. It reminds him of seasonal rituals, for cleansing out the old and rebirth by flame. He stops a guard who has not been kind but has not been violent and asks what holy day is being celebrated below.

“This isn't a celebration. This is justice.” The soldier's lion maw wide is with ugly pride, and Dedue wonders at how small a soul this must be for such hatred to make it feel great. “They’re burning the Duscur district down, with all the vermin inside.”

Dedue returns to Dimitri’s bedside and stays guard through the night. He does not look at the blue walls or blue curtains or blue carpet. He looks only at Dimitri, wearing the bandages earned from saving Dedue's life, breathing long and deep in sleep at last. It is only in the presence of the steady rise and fall of Dimitri’s breathing that Dedue feels safe enough to rest.

  
**iv.**

As he faces his death, Dimitri’s father says, “Tear them apart.” 

As he faces his grief, Felix’s father says, “He died like a true knight.”

One way or another, all children find ways to answer their parents' words. Gustave finds Dimitri sobbing apologies to his father’s severed head and must fight to pull him away. When Glenn's armor is sent home, Felix snatches from it an iron spur turned black in the fire and flees from his father's eulogy as quick as he can. In days to come, Dimitri’s headaches will grow so terrible that nothing but sedation will quiet them, and Felix will keep that spur near him as if it were a ward against worship of death. Felix will never forgive his father for the shape of his grief, and Dimitri will never forgive himself for his own survival, and these two things will not meet well.

Before, it was their fathers who brought them together, a bond planned long before either came to be. When Felix was newly born, wrapped up in cloth and safely attended by the palace’s best physicians, Rodrigue brought his still-crying child to be set in the crib beside his future king. When Dimitri was old enough to understand duty and too young not to get into foolish fights with dear friends, Lambert calmed his petulance with the reminder, “You must always cherish this bond, Dimitri, for it will save you in years to come. Let Felix be to you what Rodrigue has been to me, and you will never lose your way.” 

But those were their fathers’ hopes for them. Now, Felix and Dimitri wear the wounds left by their fathers’ regrets.

  
**v.**

When the letter arrives at House Galatea, it goes like this:

Ingrid’s lord father calls her and Sylvain, who is visiting, to his study. Ingrid yells at Sylvain, because she thinks he got them into trouble. Sylvain claims innocence, because he also thinks he got them into trouble. They come into the room squabbling with each other, see Lord Galatea’s face, and stop.

Ingrid doesn’t cry when her father breaks the news. She looks ahead as she listens, attentive and dutiful. Then she speaks in a voice so strange and stilted that Sylvain wonders if she is quoting from one of her books. 

“I’m sorry, father. I don’t think I understood. I thought for a moment you said that Glenn and His Majesty King Lambert were dead. Could you please repeat the message?” 

The second time her father says it, Ingrid nods. She excuses herself to her quarters, and she does not return.

Sylvain tries offering her favorite foods. He tries reminding her that her horse needs grooming. He tries promising to stop hitting on every girl in town. It doesn’t work, not a single one, so he does go out into town, and he does hit on every girl there, and Ingrid finds him with bruised cheekbones and bloodied teeth and he smiles because she is finally outside her rooms.

It’s better, after that. She comes to dinner and will talk with him, though she sometimes lapses into silence. She goes back to tending her horse and training with her lance, and it is only occasionally that she cries in the middle of her work. She nods in understanding when her father explains that the house had emptied out because, while she was in mourning, the regent sent out a call for men to subjugate the people of Duscur, and her brothers left to carry out justice for the dead.

Sylvain stays for a long time, longer than he meant to, but it does not take long at all for the news to come back to them: Duscur is in ashes. It’s over. The Kingdom has acted out its revenge.

Ingrid says, “Good.” 

She is thirteen years old. The boy she loves is dead. She is condoning mass slaughter.

“They’re animals. They got what they deserved.”

Sylvain, who has loved Ingrid and Felix and Dimitri for as long as he can remember, excuses himself from the table with a joke and a grin. He goes out again, and he doesn't come back. When Ingrid comes to scold him, just like she has since she was old enough to say his name, it takes every ounce of self-control Miklan beat into him not to sob with relief that this girl he loves still exists. She hasn’t gone, she is not lost to him. She has just grown up in her own ugly, unforgivable way, and now cruelty is part of her. He can get that. 

After all, he is just the same.

  
**vi.**

When Dedue comes back from a trip to the city with fresh bruises, Dimitri loses in a moment all the calm he has spent months building and finds himself choking on his wrath. “Who did this?” he demands. “Tell me who it was. Tell me where they were, describe their faces. I will see them face justice for what they have done.”

“You must not, Your Highness,” pleads Dedue. Dimitri hates that title, he hates to hear Dedue use it. He hates that he can only protect Dedue by accepting this distortion of their bond. “They do not deserve your wrath.”

“Any who harms you deserves my wrath and more besides,” Dimitri insists, but Dedue only shakes his head.

“There is a district here. They are rebuilding it from the ashes. This morning, I found myself craving food from Duscur. My people…”

He opens a bag. Fresh spices and plants Dimitri cannot name are gathered within. He catches echoes of their scent, completely foreign to Faerghus's cuisine, and he knows that Dedue would gladly share this trace of home with him and that the power to share that form of companionship is something he has lost with the rest.

Dimitri looks once more at Dedue’s injuries. And he is struck, all at once, with the sheer _magnitude_ of what Dedue gives up by staying near him this way.

“I do not mind,” Dedue promises. “You are my home now. My family. The scorn of my people will not drive me away.”

His head screams, _I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry,_ but his stepmother tells him, “Apologies do nothing to give back what you took.”

Dimitri takes Dedue’s hands in his, and he promises back everything Dedue has offered him. It is true, after all. When these are his people, and this is what his uncle made, what other home or family does he have left?

  
**vii.**

A child left alone throws herself into perfection and strives to be good enough to bring her father home. A former thief with a new family loses his brother to the swing of an executioner’s axe. But her father does not return, and his brother demands vengeance. There is only moving forward with the absence. 

In his father’s voice, heedless of consequence, Dimitri tells the regent, “You are damned, uncle. You are damned for what you’ve done in our family’s name. When I am king, I will make you answer for the suffering you have brought.”

One day, these losses will come back to collect.

  
**viii.**

Felix knows the country is in chaos, because his father has stopped trying to hide anything from him, or at least anything that he doesn’t hide from himself. Margrave Gautier sends a missive that he needs more knights to fend off invaders from Sreng, so House Fraldarius offers them a full battalion of pikemen. The bandits in Fraldarius become too much to handle, so Gautier sends back the battalion with a complement of mounted knights. They trade back and forth this way, sharing resources neither of them can afford to spare, keeping a fingertip hold on peace and stability. Sometimes, Sylvain comes with the Gautier soldiers, but Felix is never permitted to join the Fraldarius men.

One night, slipping past his father’s study late after training, Felix catches his father and Sylvain speaking privately. He listens:

“When you fight together—and I fear that day will come sooner than I might like—I ask that you look out for him.” Felix’s father sounds _so old_. Felix knows he isn’t, and he knows that his old man can more than manage to sound hale and healthy when he orders about their household or visits Dimitri, but right now he sounds like he has one foot in the grave. Felix wonders if the grave is Glenn's, or if it's only the dead king's tomb that he is living in.

“I will, Your Grace. On my honor, I’ll keep Felix safe.” And Sylvain, Sylvain does not sound like a skirt-chasing troublemaker, the boy who pushed Ingrid into a pile of horse dung and then tried to hide in the trees for a week to escape her fury. He sounds composed, serious. He sounds like—

“Thank you, Sylvain. One day, you will make an excellent knight.” 

Felix does not speak to either of them for the rest of Sylvain's visit. It takes an angry letter from Ingrid before he starts answering Sylvain's messages again.

  


**ix.**

It’s a rebellion in the west, nobles grabbing for power in the vacuum left by the king’s death and the regent’s mismanagement. Duke Fraldarius, ever loyal, has been informed of the request for men. “It will not be difficult to put down,” his father informs him, and Felix already knows where this is going but he waits for the old man to say it, to throw him out there, to do what they both want him to and just give the command, “but the regent thought it best that His Highness be sent in as a commander to quell it.” 

But his father does not give the order. He studies the letter once more, and he seems to be far away.

Felix waits a long, suffocating moment, then snaps, “I’m going,” because he isn’t fucking asking for permission and he knows his father would let him die for Dimitri even if he were. His father nods, assigns Felix as squire to his best knight, and sends him westward with a hundred soldiers that should be protecting their people but will protect Dimitri instead.

When Felix joins Dimitri, he finds his friend anxious and masking it badly. It isn’t fear of dying, Felix can tell, because there’s a dullness in Dimitri’s eyes when they talk about the enemy numbers, their poor equipment, their lack of training. Dimitri knows as well as Felix does that they’ve been given something they can handle.

“It will be an easy fight,” Dimitri says, distant and resigned. “My uncle is a fool and a monster for what he has let happen, but he has not sent me here to die.”

The boy from Duscur isn’t with Dimitri. Felix asks about it later, when there aren't others around, and Dimitri becomes bitter and distant again.

“My uncle wants me to show that I can control our territories. He thinks seeing the future king put down the rebellion personally will encourage order across the land. Or more likely one of his advisors thinks it. ” Dimitri seems so tired. He has given up sitting upright as their instructors always lectured them and is leaning heavily on Felix’s shoulder instead. “Either way. The image would be ‘sullied by the presence of someone from Duscur.’”

There is anger in Dimitri’s voice. There is a growl in it, so discordant against the plaintive sweetness Felix knew. Felix thinks, _You've learned how to hate,_ and he doesn't think it's right that Dimitri changed while he wasn't there.

Still, the private moments belong to him. It is to Felix that Dimitri retreats after a long day of planning with the other commanders, kingdom knights with years more experience than them both combined who defer to his opinions and watch him for mistakes. It is Felix that Dimitri asks to have beside him whenever they set up camp, nearby enough to hear Dimitri cry out in his sleep and come to find him to make it stop. And it is Felix Dimitri confides in at the darkest hour, a whisper in the night before they are to meet the rebels in battle.

“I don’t want to kill them, Felix,” says the boy Felix has given his faith to, so soft and quiet that Felix is scared he might not even be there. “How can I? How can I put anyone through that? Sometimes, I feel like I’m not myself anymore. I feel like I am just a vessel for the dead.”

The next day, the Kingdom army sets fire to the enemy camp to cause confusion and disorder in their soldiers. The next day, Felix realizes that Dimitri is not a vessel for the dead but one of their number, animated by nothing but a desire to add more to their ranks.

“Beast!” Felix is sick on the smell of blood and smoke and viscera, and he wants Dimitri to come back to him, he wants Glenn to explain to him why Dimitri left, but Glenn is gone so all Felix can do is shout at this thing that has taken his friend away. “You’re not Dimitri anymore! You’re just a bloodthirsty animal, a beast wearing his skin!” 

There, where the one thing that survived the Tragedy dies, Felix understands with perfect clarity: this country's love of death will take everything from him. It took Glenn, his father, his future, and now he knows it has taken Dimitri too. If Felix lets it, it will take Ingrid and Sylvain and anything else it can get. 

Felix does not go near the boar for the rest of the campaign. When he gets home, he growls at his father, “Foster me with the Gautiers for my training. Or the Galateas, or House Rowe, I don't care. I can't stay here and listen to you prattle on about our duty to that family of corpses anymore.”

His father doesn’t, of course. But he also doesn’t ask Felix to fight beside Dimitri again. 

  
**x.**

“No true knight would weep over the locket of a traitor,” his stepmother tells him. “You are too weak to avenge us. Too pathetic.”

“You must kill them,” his father tells him. “You must dispose of doubt and tear the traitors limb from limb.”

“You’re a wild animal,” Glenn tells him. “You aren't Dimitri anymore. You’re a bloodthirsty beast wearing his skin.” 

_I’m sorry_, Dimitri answers. _I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry—_

But apologies are never enough to give back what has been taken away. 

Dimitri returns to the capital, triumphant commander and warrior prince, and his actions are celebrated in the city streets. They hold a feast where his uncle drinks too much too readily and disappears with yet another woman for a week. Dimitri retreats to his quarters with a headache he can find no relief from, and only Dedue keeps him moving through the next several weeks.

  
**xi**

Wounds scab over and fester underneath the skin. The years count on, and then these tragedies come together all at once to share a half-dozen scenes. A girl tells a boy she is glad his family died suffering. A boy draws closer to the only person who wants him alive. A knight sees those he would protect in pain, knows no way to help, throws himself deeper into his indulgences. When the ricochet comes around for a thief’s father, it lights a fire that mirrors the one still eating up a prince’s heart. “Why won’t you talk to me?” begs a child, but her father will not speak to her even fighting at her side.

“Boar,” Felix spits.

“Tear them apart,” say the dead with Dimitri’s mouth.

But for a time, it gets better. For a few brief months they come together: the lovers on the balcony, the ambitious lord crowned, all the second act promises that the future could be theirs. A girl apologizes for the hate she let grow. A boy finds that there are more people who he might call home. A father offers carved wooden dolls to his child, and a knight takes comfort in knowing that the ones he loves are closer than they have been in years.

Then comes war. They learn they are not the only set of tragedies echoing across the stage.

  
**xii**

Nine years from that opening salvo, a leading man in blood-heavy furs drags himself upright by the strength of his spear. Other actors gather around him to bear witness, and each of them chokes on their lines as they realize once more that they are helpless to stop the show. The beast who cannot face himself as man vows to make the world as raw and jagged as his soul has become, and those nearest to him are the first to bleed.

Tragedy draws taut its bow once more and claims another in the ricochet.

**Author's Note:**

> you ever think about how seven out of eight blue lions were directly or indirectly affected by the tragedy? you ever think about how their coping mechanisms often made each other’s issues even worse? you ever think about how the consequences of the tragedy just keep hitting these kids again and again? 
> 
> credit to shadowshrike’s [emerald moon: coalition of deer and lion](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20225992/chapters/47933404) for the idea that dimitri probably internalized felix’s insults by hearing them through glenn’s voice without even realizing it. i could not stop thinking about the way their problems intersected, and then this happened.
> 
> i have a fe3h twitter now, @[marezafic](https://twitter.com/marezafic)! hmu if you want!


End file.
